In one of the final steps of the decommission of Iowa State’s nuclear reactor, the last shipment of nuclear fuel was recently removed from campus to be stored at a nuclear waste repository.

After two years of planning, the final shipment was sent out Jan. 7 from the Nuclear Engineering Laboratory to a holding facility at the Savannah River Facilities in South Carolina.

Dan Bullen, associate professor of mechanical engineering and nuclear reactor facility director, said this marks the end of the first phase of decommissioning the reactor. Bullen said the second phase, which will take place this summer, will be to dismantle the actual reactor.

Although much care is being taken in decommissioning the reactor, Scott Wendt, manager of the nuclear reactor, said the facility is too small to cause any serious safety hazards.

“In a large reactor where they have high radiation fields, they use robots. Our fields are low enough that people go down in there themselves,” he said.

Wendt said the process for dismantling Iowa State’s reactor is similar to the process of asbestos removal.

Bullen said the fuel is in the form of aluminum plates with a uranium alloy about 2 to 3 feet on each side. He said it will be repackaged and disposed of in the form of nuclear waste.

Wendt said the maximum power rating of the reactor when it was still operational was 10 kilowatts, meaning it could raise the temperature of water from 80 to 88 degrees Fahrenheit at a rate of 10 gallons per minute.

Bullen said the reactor was first commissioned in 1959 primarily for the purposes of teaching, although in its early years it was used for some research projects.

Wendt said Iowa State had the first graduate program in nuclear engineering, but in 1996, the nuclear engineering graduate program, as well as the reactor, was scrapped.

“The number of graduate and undergraduate students dropped way down to the point where they decided to close the program,” he said. “Once the program was closed, we tried to find other work for the reactor, other classes we could participate with, and there wasn’t anything for a small reactor such as ours.”

Wendt said the cause for the lack of student interest in nuclear engineering was due to the lack of new nuclear reactor facilities.

“The students were scared off,” he said. “Now if there are any men or women from Iowa who want to study nuclear engineering, they have to go [out of state].”

Wendt said there are about 30 other U.S. universities that operate reactors.

Bullen said the decision to decommission the reactor was mainly a cost-cutting measure.

“Our license requires that we provide trained and licensed operators and that we keep a full compliment of staff for the safe operation of the reactor,” he said.

Bullen said now that the reactor is nearly gone, officials are trying to figure out what to do with the Nuclear Engineering Building. No plans have currently been made for the facility’s future.